Readability is a subjective parameter used to measure an aspect of
code quality. It is based on the assumption that code should be easily
comprehensible by humans, both in its form and in its meaning.

I don't like them for many reasons, but especially because it contradicts the "primarily opinion-based" close reason:

Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

Do you think these tags add something to Stack Overflow? Do we really need them?

There exist algorithms that assign readability scores to prose. I don't know how good they are at their job but certainly questions about how to implement the algorithms themselves can be asked in a non "primarily opinion-based" manner. Do similar algorithms exist for code?
– LouisFeb 16 '16 at 17:01

16

A question like, "How do I make this code more readable" is of course going to be opinion based, but not every question that is somehow related to readability is necessarily going to be primarily opinion based. In general, rather than trying to decide if a tag is going to be opinion based, you really need to evaluate individual questions (that may or may not have that tag).
– ServyFeb 16 '16 at 17:02

3

You don't like the subject. Please explain why you prefer to waste ~5 minutes on reading such a question, only to discover that it is about a subject you don't like, instead of knowing up front to not look at it.
– Hans PassantFeb 16 '16 at 18:04

3

@HansPassant It's not the subject that I don't like, it's the tag.
– MarounFeb 16 '16 at 18:31

2

Skimmed through a couple of these tags... this definitively needs cleanup, I'm unsure what to do with the tags, through.
– BraiamFeb 17 '16 at 2:14

I think we need this tab, that helps people can improve their code. The code good or bad I think is when someone look at this they can understand what it done.
– Binh LEFeb 18 '16 at 2:49

1 Answer
1

code-readability could have legitimate uses in meta-programming or tools used by programmers. Developing a code analysis tool (like ReSharper) or other IDE considerations could use this tag. In practice, it doesn't look like most of the questions with this tag are using it properly. Many are opinion-based, and others would been better suited on Code Review (not that migrating them should be a priority). I'm not really sure what to do about the tag.

readability falls into a very similar vein as code-readability and should be treated the same way. Based on their tag wikis, they could even be synonyms.

human-readable does not strike me as opinion-based. We should just keep the tag and manually close/retag the poor questions as we find them. If you wanted to store data in a human-readable fashion but can't use an existing form (like XML or JSON), this tag would be relevant. Its tag wiki excerpt confirms that the tag is supposed to be used in relation to presenting data:

Human-readable is a representation of data or information that can be naturally read by humans.